Rorschach paintings: From ink to art

Vesna Jovanovic is perhaps not your typical artist, and her works are most certainly not typical. Once an arts and chemistry double-major, she now draws inspiration for her paintings from nature, science and psychology.

Her most recent works? A series called "Pareidolia," in which she starts with a random ink spill, and then fills in the silhouette with meticulous drawings ranging from the organic to the mechanical: veins and neurons interlaced with glass-work and electronic wiring.


The title itself is genius:

"I eventually titled the series Pareidolia, a term used to describe the psychological phenomenon of recognizing specific, identifiable forms in otherwise random stimuli. Common examples of pareidolia are the recognition of animals in clouds or faces in wood grain, and it is the basis of the Rorschach test, the series of inkblots used by psychologists to gain insight into a patient’s mental state."

Indeed, the creative process itself works like an applied Rorschach test, turning an inkblot and its connotations for the artist into a work art.

Check out Jovanovic's portfolio here.
Via Seed Magazine.

The world in miniature

Okay, bear with me here, because when I first saw this, I thought it was about how to take photographs of miniature model landscapes - something I'd much rather leave to the more arts-and-crafty among us. But that's not what this is about.

This is about taking an ordinary photo, say of a real city or landscape, and making it look like it's depicting miniature models. Like the photo below... Toy boats on a miniature lake, right?


Nope, it's actually just a doctored image of a real life coastal landscape.

Trivial? Useless? Maybe, but check out how it's done.

TiltShiftMaker is a site that does just that, and it does it very simply, by just reducing the depth of field of the photo: the portion of the photo that looks sharp and in-focus. Turns out, the shallower the depth of field, the smaller and closer the objects in a photo look, to the point of making real landscapes and buildings look like nothing more than miniature models.

The reason this works is that when we look at something small and close to our eyes, the portion of our field of vision that is in focus is very small. Conversely when we look at something very large and far away, the potion that is in focus is actually much greater. So when we notice a shallow depth of field, regardless of what we're really looking at, our brain signals SMALL and CLOSE (rather than BIG and FAR) and we use this to make a determination as to what we might be looking at - for example, tiny model boats as opposed to a life-size coastal landscape.

What fascinates me about this is that we do this entirely unconsciously. I didn't know anything about photography or depths of field before looking into this -- in fact I had to wiki depth of field to make sure I was talking about the right concept. But on some level, my brain did know. It's just one thing among a huge quantity of information that we unconsciously process in order to make deductions about the world around us from what is essentially a pretty limited set of sensory perceptions.

Here's other related example - it's a pretty common optical illusion.
Look at the image below... Concave or convex?


To virtually everyone the left side looks like buttons, while the right side looks like shallow holes. The interesting question, however, is why.

The answer is that we make the determination based on how the disks are shaded, interpreting the colors as light and shadow. If there is one thing we know intuitively (though perhaps not fully consciously) about light is that it tends to come from above - from the sun or from lamps. So a disk that is lighter on top we interpret as a protruding button catching light from above, whereas a disk that is darker on top we interpret as a hole shaded from above and catching light on the bottom.

In a way our minds are incredibly ingenious at noticing patterns in our perceptions and using them as clues to navigate the world around us, basically making educated guesses along the way.

But know enough about how the mind works, and you can easily trick it!

Via Apartment Therapy.

Art down the rabbit hole

A philosophy major turned artist, Maggie Taylor depicts a whimsical world that looks like something Lewis Carroll might have dreamed up had Alice's adventures through the looking glass led her into Monty Python's flying circus.


Check out Maggie Taylor's website for more about the artist and her quirky gorgeous works.

A world inside a book

Brian Dettmer is an American artist, mostly known for his works involving alterations of existing media: books, maps, records, audio casettes...

Among his most fascinating pieces are his book carvings, turning ordinary books into sculptures and revealing their content as a three-dimensional work of art.

This one is entitled Science in the Twentieth Century.



Check out more of Dettmer's works on Flickr.

Found through Centripetal Notion.

Hearing sights, seeing music

I wish I had synesthesia!

It's a neurological "condition" (minus the negative connotations), affecting about 4% of the population, in which cognitive and sensory pathways "cross over" one another, leading to an unusual "blending" of perceptions.

Sight gets mixed in with hearing, hearing with taste and so on... One might experience blue as not just a color, but also as a taste; or the sound of a cello as inherently "green", not simply as a metaphor, but because the visual experience of "green" accompanies the auditory experience of the sound in a very real and literal way.

It's fascinating stuff and truly makes one wonder about the possible differences among people's perception of the world.

So if this has sparked your interest, here are two interesting articles on synesthesia:

In this interview, neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the synesthesia gene and the The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test for synesthesia aimed at promoting scientific progress in the field.

Even more fascinating: consider synesthesia from the perspective of art. Artist and synesthete Marcia Smilack creates photographs and videos to recreate some of her visual-auditory sensations for non-synesthetes. You can read about her in this Seed Magazine article, The Most Beautiful Painting You've Ever Heard.

Also, check out Smilack's portfolio here.

Follow-up review: RjDj

So I finally caved and bought an iPhone, taking a big ole swig from the collective jug of kool-aid. Oh but it tastes so good!!

And, it gave me the opportunity for a follow-up review to my original post about that quirky RjDj app. Quick reminder:

"RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time."

That's how I had described it the first time around.

Having now sampled it first hand, I'll revise that description. It's not so much music as a stream of psychedelic-sounding repetitions, as if a sound, rather than merely being heard and registered by your brain, instead lingered there a bit longer, bouncing off the sides of your skull and creating weird reverberating echos.

So... music, no.

But it is extremely interesting and weird and fascinating. I had it running while I was unloading the dishwasher, and the clanking of dishes (among my top 10 most annoying sounds) somehow turned into a strangely fitting noise-pop soundtrack to that most mundane of activities.

There's certainly more that can be done with the app, including sampling different "scenes," which are essentially different algorithms for manipulating the sound inputs.

I'll do some more exploring and post a follow-up if I discover anything nifty.

Check out the app here, and my original post here!

Nothing but flowers

At New York's Nyehouse gallery, Alexis Rockman's exhibit depicts an eerie, post-apocalyptic world dominated by plants and animals -- beautiful, but strange, like three-eared rabbits and conjoined daisies.

According to Rockman:

“In my mind, that had to do with mutation and pesticides... The idea of the perfect lawn.”

Check out the slide show and commentary on Seed Magazine.

Alice's Adventures in Microscopic Wonderland

Three beetles sip tea at a table made of butterfly wings, set in a field of crystallized vitamin C while aphids fly overhead, and it looks every bit as fanciful as Lewis Carroll's world beyond the rabbit hole.



This image, by illustrator Colleen Champ and microscopist Dennis Kunkel, was among the first prize winners at the 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

Read more about it on Wired Magazine and on the contest website, where you can see other fascinating images that blur the lines between science and art.

Happy Birthday Dr Seuss!

Dr Seuss turns 105 today!

And with all the fear- and misery-mongering going on these days, it's as good a time as ever to think about what crazy, colorful, exciting, trippy things the future might hold.

Soundtrack to your life?

This may be the moment when I finally cave and buy an iPhone.

Possibly the most fascinating iPhone app I've heard of yet: RjDj takes in sounds from your surroundings (voices, street noise, tapping on computer keyboards...) and plays it back to you as music compositions in real-time.

Also amusing is the creators' shameless analogy to psychedelics as a selling point:

"The listening experience of RjDj is similar to the effects of drugs. Drugs affect our sensory perception, so does RjDj. RjDj is a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation."

Check out this video demo: